Triple-gabled entrance to Home Farm at Foxwarren Park, near Cobham, Surrey, c.1860

Photographs by the (2008). You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.

Triple-gabled entrance to Home Farm at Foxwarren Park. Designed by Charles Buxton with the assistance of Frederick Barnes. c.1860. Near Cobham, Surrey Trevor Yorke explains that the medieval estate had its own "demesne" which produced food for the manor, and that, despite all the changes to the social fabric, the custom lingered on in the typical "Home Farm" of early- and mid-nineteenth-century estates. Now, however, these areas would be further away from the main house, and more efficient. Like this one on the Foxwarren Park estate, they would "usually be formed round a courtyard, with brick or stone buildings containing some of the earliest farm machines," and they would contain various other outhouses for cattle, horses and so on, including "sometimes a dairy" &mdash as this one does. There would also be accommodation for "the bailiff, steward or manager" (166).

Left: The dairy at Home Farm. Right: The dairy at Home Farm. [Click on images to enlarge them.]

It is hard to see why Ian Nairn and Nikolaus Pevsner should have called this a "nightmare MODEL FARM," though they go on to describe it perfectly accurately as "three sided with multiple bargeboarded gables, a cottage in one corner, and brick slits for windows, grouped five or six at a time under crow-stepped gables" (246). It is obviously a well-loved and well-maintained home now.